Teaching During a Pandemic: Academic Neoliberalism and Emotionalization

Abstract

The article examines the change in the content of teachers' work, teaching practices and models of interaction in a virtual classroom, as well as labor costs for performing professional duties and their types. The authors consider redefining the balance of work and leisure during the forced transition to distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic focusing on how teachers see their work, how they structure their working and leisure time, and what strategies they develop for adapting to new working and living conditions.

The forced transition to an online learning format demanded that university teachers quickly restructure their work practices, redefine the place and content of work in the context of changing boundaries between the public and private spheres, and fit their professional duties into a new regime of daily life in self-isolation. The article applies the main provisions of the sociology of everyday life (Erving Goffman), with a focus on the micro-level of the analysis of everyday communications, and the sociology of emotions (Arlie Russell Hochschild). The empirical base of the study consists of 28 semi-structured interviews with professors from Russian universities. The analysis of these data made it possible to formulate a number of conclusions and to understand what strategies for online teaching and interaction in a virtual classroom the teachers developed while adapting to the forced transition to a distance format. It also reveals how the change in the place and content of teachers' work determined the revision of the policies for controlling their time and labor costs, including an increase in the amount of emotional work in a situation of compaction and heterotopicity of space. In general, the forced massive transition of teachers to the remote work has actualized the problems related to the content of their work and their accountability to administrative structures and formal rules of regulation, and exacerbated social inequalities in the context of the neoliberal academy.

Acknowledgements. The article was prepared within the research project «Development of the educational model of liberal arts and sciences (Liberal Arts) in the context of digitalization» (RANEPA, 2020, project ID in the Pure system of St. Petersburg State University 53583510).